A report published yesterday by the European Transport Safety Council (ETSC), “Ranking EU Progress on Car Occupant Safety”, proposes that 900 lives could be saved every year in the EU if car manufacturers were required to fit seat-belt reminder sensors to front and rear passenger seats. Despite the large number of deaths still occurring, the report finds that existing measures have been very effective. The report estimates that 8600 car occupants survived severe collisions in 2012 because they were wearing a seatbelt.
According to the ETSC: "Around 240,000 car occupants were killed in road collisions in the EU in the years 2001-2012. There were 12,345 deaths in 2012 compared with 27,700 in 2001, a cut of 55%. Deaths of car occupants were cut by more than the overall death rate (49%) and substantially more than the rate for other road users (41%). Car occupants have therefore benefitted more than other road users from road safety measures adopted over the past decade. This is not surprising, as many of those measures were targeted at car occupants including increased enforcement of the main traffic offences, improved vehicle occupant protection, and, to a lesser extent, improved infrastructure. But car occupant deaths still represented almost half (48%) of all road deaths in 2010-2012. So achieving the EU road safety target, to reduce road deaths by half by 2020, will therefore continue to depend strongly on the EU and its Member States sustaining reductions in car occupant deaths.
Click on this link to access and download the ETSC report.
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